Introduction
Sociology of politics popularly known as political sociology is one of the main branches of political science. Max weber is accredited as one of the great contributors to this field particularly on issues about power, acquisition, and distribution of power, legitimacy of power, bureaucracy, and political participation among other issues. This essay briefly looks at some of his contributions to this interesting field of study. In addition, we shall define terms such as power, domination, legitimate authority types, monocratic bureaucracy, and parliamentary reconstruction.
Max Weber’s Contributions to Sociology of Politics
To begin with, Russel as cited in Cassano and Buono (2009) identify Weber as one of the “intellectual roads” that have brought the United States and the Western World to identity politics. Identity politics refers to the politics of a society in which political participation is advanced; one in which people consciously participate in the governance of their society with their brains. In such a political culture people have a high level of self-awareness and are aware of their desired destination over a definite period.
He further argues that even though Weber was a structuralist like Marx, he differed from him in the sense that he believed that any society that had a history had a different structure and that each of its components could play a defining role.
On State and politics, Thakur (2006) explains that Weber understood the state as a “political structure or grouping” that succeeds in claiming the monopoly to the acceptable use force in maintenance and enforcement of law and order. Politics which according to Ritzer (2010) came into being before the state, politics is a process that continuously targets at controlling the human relations of domination.
Weber as cited in Ritzer (2010) defines power as the possibility that an actor in a given socio-political relationship will be able to do on his own will despite opposition. The assumption here is that there are more than two actors one being able to make the other do what he would not have otherwise done. For example, take the simple child-parent relationship in a home setup; in such a case the parent can make a teenage child fail to attend an eagerly awaited friend’s birthday bash should the parent feel that attending the same would lead to an undesirable outcome.
Weber we are told by Thakur (2006) saw the political party as a kind of social relationship that was associative and committed to securing power within a group for its managers to achieve certain ideal or material benefits for its members.
According to Thakur (2006), Weber understood domination as the possibility that a rule with a particular content will be upheld or obeyed by a group of persons. According to Ritzer (2010), Weber came up with three types of legitimate authority namely: Legal authority which is rational and is founded on the belief in the rationally created laws and in the moral acceptance of leaders chosen following that law, traditional authority based on the belief in the originality of the societal traditions and Charismatic authority founded upon the member’s free subjection to an individual differentiated by “his holiness, his heroism or his exemplariness.”Thakur (2006) asserts that it is generally accepted that democratization and bureaucracy are intimately related. He adds that Weber regarded bureaucratic management of public affairs as the origin of the modern state. Lastly, parliamentary reconstruction refers to the reconfiguration of the parliament in democratic societies to facilitate the representation of hitherto marginalized social groups particularly women, the disabled, minority groups, children among others.
Conclusion
It is obvious as briefly shown above that Max Weber profoundly contributed to the discipline known to us as political sociology. It is, therefore, safe to argue that his intellectual clarification of some of the main political concepts mentioned above has had an undeniable impact on our politics and even our way of politicking.
References
Cassano, G. and Buono, R.A.D (2009). Crisis, Politics and Critical Sociology. Beijing: BRILL.
Ritzer, G. (2010). Classical Sociological Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Thakur, A.P (2006). Weber’s political sociology. New Delhi: Global Vision Publishing Ho.